FPS Shattering BUG Discovered & Examined! - Environmental Effects...

[DJSatane]

Environmental Effects FPS Killer BUG aka. the killer Polygon!

I have read how number of people complained about bad fps even on good spec PC's, I havent experienced it until friday...and ever since I noticed something and reason why this occurs! Below I will present you with my findings.

First, this is confirmed on SH4 ver 1.1. Second, this bug revolves around using of Environmental Effects option which is responsible for clouds shadows and volumetric fog, in addition you can see parts of ships through the water to a certain depth etc...

Now let's get to business:

1. I start a training mission and right off the bat as I look around the horizon I encounter terrible fps drop in one spot. It's so bad my fps drops to 1-5fps, everywhere else its basically 60fps(vsync on). I discover its this mysteriously looking rectangle polygon sticking out of water:

Notice on left side you can see a rectangle polygon that differs in brightness, notice my fps of 1, I can barely click to switch to another station to regain normal fps.

2. I go into Free Camera mode and get close to this entity. I play around with graphical options and narrow this bug is tied to Environmental Effects:

Notice Environmental Effects is turned on and I am up close to this mysterious polygon, fps is 5 in the picture. Btw, this polygon is very small about 1/10 of a submarine length, I just got very close to it in this picture.

3. Now I click off Environmental Effects and bam look what happens! The polygon dissapears and look at my fps it maxes out again at 60:


4. Here are 2 more pictures of this bug:



NOTES:

This polygon can always be found near your submarine or at least within 1000meters on beginning of tutorials and other scripted missions, however it reappears in other places and you never know when you can run into this. Assuming of course you play with Environmental Effects on.

* I haven't seen this in 1.0 version, only in 1.1. However, I only played 1.0 for few minutes, where 1.1 many hours.

CONCLUSION: Do not play with Environmental Effects on to avoid this, last night I played online with my friend and during deck gun fight where me and him ganged up on 1 destroyer he ran into this bug point blank range while using deck gun and it killed his fps to the point where it killed entire multiplayer session(he was the server).

My computer is adequate btw, here are the specs:

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU E6700, 2GB (4x512MB) DDR2 800mhz RAM, ATI Radeon X1950 XTX @ Catalyst 7.1, SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio, Windows XP Professional SP2.

I hope this helps people who had bad fps due to this, as they now know how to avoid it. But turning this effect on removes the beautiful look of submarine in shalow waters...